The Dawning of the Day (8 page)

T
he slope was rank with goldenrod and asters, dense tangles of blackberry vines where some fruit still hung shiny as lacquered ornaments, clumps of raspberry canes with a few late berries. Where the land reached the rocks, the wild rosebushes burned against the granite, wine-red leaves and scarlet haws. In the midst of all this hot color, the clumps of bay were cool oases of green.

She descended into steep coves and examined driftwood stumps worn to a silver moiré finish. She followed narrow trails over dry and aromatic turf that was sometimes strewn with dry rockweed from past storms. There was a springlike trilling and fluting of song sparrows from the woods, an occasional twittering flurry of young birds around an alder patch, and grasshoppers everywhere. Philippa walked until the last angle of the Bennetts' roof was out of sight, and she was alone between the sea and the thick dark belt of spruce woods that crested the island like an Indian's roach.

Then she found a place where she could sit on a warm red rock and put her back against another one. From her feet, the rocks shelved in a flight of giant steps to the water that rippled in quietly over the swaying, shadowy rockweed. A little way out, two gulls appeared to be standing in contemplative silence on the water, their ledge barely submerged.

Philippa sat with her chin in her hands, letting herself go into the stream of the day as if she had an animal's consciousness of the warmth of light, of the smooth cold of shadows, of space and scents and the hundreds of tiny pin points of sound that made up the island's peculiar silence. Boats were coming home. A thick-shouldered boy in yellow oil pants and a duck-billed cap rowed by in a peapod, so close to the rockweed he would have seen her if he'd looked up. It was Perley Fraser. He rowed standing up and pushing on the oars, and the shallow boat slid as swiftly over the water as its canoe ancestors must have done in the days when the Indians fished these shores.

Perley was Helen Campion's son by her first marriage, a stocky, swarthy boy of seventeen. He had barely answered the few times Philip-pa had spoken to him, and his stolid face with the narrow opaque black eyes never changed. Unless he was working around the fishhouse with Foss, he was always alone. He did not seem serene or self-contained in his loneliness; he appeared only to endure existence. She wondered if he were a little subnormal. Certainly he was very unattractive, and for this she found him pathetic and his mother's references to him pathetic also.

“Perley just wouldn't study,” his mother had explained to her emphatically. “Crazy to be on the water—part gull, that one. 'Course we were set on him having an education, he's smart enough, but he broke us down! Just kept on in the eighth grade, wouldn't work for his pass into high school!” Her face and neck had turned dusky red in remembered anger, her tone sharp. “May Gerrish told me to my face he was stupid, but I told
her
that he was smarter than all the rest of us put together. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it, too!”

Philippa watched him now and wondered if the warm lustrous day, the silver eddies behind his oars, the motion of his boat, had any power to move him.

Others came after him. The calm was broken into continuously changing patterns of wake crossing wake, of water splashing against the rocks, of gulls that flew up with a strong beating of wings and then settled into the swells again. Whenever Philippa recognized a boat, she had a warming sense of achievement. She liked to fill Eric's letters with details about the
Kestrel
, the
White Lady II
,
Joanna S
.,
Susan C
., the
Sea Pigeon
. She wished now for a notebook to record all that she had seen and smelled and heard this afternoon.

But writing wouldn't be enough; she could feel the words crowding painfully into her throat, the need to see the fast blaze of understanding in Eric's eyes. Her consciousness of Sky and Rob only increased her longing. Why should she be dealing with other little boys and not her own? She thought, I must do something about getting him out here. . . . If I could have a couple of rooms somewhere . . . perhaps in that boarded-up house.

She saw him in shorts and jersey, standing at the edge of the water where the
Kestrel
's wake still rushed against the rocks, a slender and yet not fragile silhouette with an indomitable resilience to it. Justin's boy and hers; brown hair that grew back from his forehead as hers did, with the widow's peak; Justin's eyes, as purely gray as rain; a way of standing that was Justin's, too; but he had her own swift excitement in a new experience and her way of secretly hoarding it afterward.

Where there had been two who loved, there became three. They had created him between them, Justin and Philippa. And as she saw Eric on the rocks, she saw Justin beside her, in his old slacks, smoking and watching the goldfinches. Why had they never known a place or a time like this? They had been cheated of too much. It gave her no comfort to tell herself, as she had been telling herself for eight years, that she was only one of millions of women to whom the war had become as intimate as a disease working fatally within them. There was no comfort anywhere, ever again. The knowledge had not grown less in eight years. She still felt that the injury which had been done her was irreparable.

When she smelled tobacco smoke sharp across the redolence of spruce and grass, she wondered for a panicky moment if her grief were turning to madness. She turned her head carefully and saw Young Charles standing at the edge of the trees. He looked back at her without speaking, then blew smoke from his nostrils, dug a hole in the earth with his heel, ground out the cigarette carefully and buried it. Then he walked down the slope toward her. He had a slim, compact build and wore his dungarees and rubber boots with an air that surely would have impressed Eric much more than any television cowboy.

“Did I scare you?” he asked in his soft voice, and smiled.

“Yes,” she said. The past receded and she was grateful to him. He sat down on the rock beside her, pushing back his cap and narrowing his eyes against the sun until they were a dark glittering line behind the thick lashes. Philippa looked across the blue miles to the dark lilac waves of the mainland hills, and Charles looked at her. Why? she asked him silently. I'm thirty years old and tired from fighting battles with myself. Thirty is young enough when you count it in years, but I'm not young. The years don't matter when you count it my way.

She wanted so much to say it aloud that she spoke hastily. “I've been watching the boats come home. Little boats, big boats, all kinds of boats.”

“Guess you wonder why I haul from a peapod instead of a power-boat.” He sounded stiff. She glanced around at him and surprised a rush of red in his face.

“No, I wasn't wondering. I don't know enough about it to wonder. Perley Fraser has a peapod, too, hasn't he?”

“That fumble-foot!” Charles jerked his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “He'll always be a pod fisherman, if he don't fall over his own fat—if he don't get in his own way and drown himself one of these days.” He raked his thumbnail over the match head and lit his cigarette. His voice went stiff again. “I had me a good boat. Twenty-four feet. She wasn't much size to her, as they go around here, but she was all boat.”

“Did you lose her in a storm?” Philippa asked.

“No. You can see her any time in Brigport Harbor. I lost her on account of gambling.”

“Oh,” she said without inflection, wondering if he had expected her to be shocked. He shrugged, and pushed out his lower lip.

“Family raised pure hell about it. They had to get together and chew just so much. But I didn't care. Just kept on playing poker. Lost my shotgun up at the choppers', and the Squire—that's what I call Cap'n Charles, my old man, when I want to gowel him—he thought I'd lose my peapod next and then I'd go out on my ear because he paid for it.” He laughed softly. “They figgered when Bob Pierce came and took my boat that'd cure me of gambling. It didn't. So they think I'm the numbest thing ever feet hung on and was called a man.”

He looked at her with a wide dark stare that was incredibly young, like a colt's. “I guess they'll be relieved when they find out I'm cured now.”

“When did that happen?”

“Last week.” He kept his eyes on hers, but the color was in his face again, and she had to struggle to hide her sudden dismay. “One day last week. I guess I was gambling because I didn't have anything else to think about. I always wondered how my uncle Owen could stop raising hell so quick after he met Laurie.”

“I'm glad you've stopped,” she said pleasantly. “Perhaps you'll get your boat back now.” She stood up, hoping it seemed casual. He got up too.

“I'll have her back. Man can't do much from a peapod. I've been playing at lobstering, that's all. No sense of responsibility, the Squire says.” They walked along the path toward the next cove. “Most people call me the black sheep of the family,” he went on, “ever since Owen stopped drinking and got married.”

“You don't look terribly black to me,” said Philippa. “I'm sure they don't think too badly of you. I know when I was nineteen or so I thought everybody disapproved of me. It's something we all go through.”

“I'm twenty-one,” he said tensely. “And they think I'm a black sinner. Maybe they're right. I broke into a store once and almost went to jail. And I've been out with a married woman.” He strode off ahead of her without looking back. She walked slowly behind him, amused, touched, and appalled all at once. It had come to her suddenly that he had not been bragging to show her that he was a man, but confessing.

This was what her sister and her brother-in-law had warned her against, laughing across the dinner table. . . .
You'll be courted, Phil. It's more than recreation, it's one of the purest traditions. You should come out of this experience either a broken woman or an accomplished diplomat
.

Perhaps it could be a joke, if she were callous enough. But at the moment she was very unhappy about it.

Charles was waiting for her, lying back against the trunk of a small twisted spruce and gazing up through its sparse boughs at the sky. He looked like some youthful deity caught unawares on the shore of a Grecian island. He turned his head and smiled at her as if the past moments had not existed.

“Careful there,” he said. “The grass is some slippery.”

They went down into the next cove. A warmth arose from the rounded beach rocks driven into a ridge by violent tides. The great ribs of a ship were silvery under the matted beach peas. On the other side of the cove the ground rose up into a rounding green shape against the sky, like a Viking barrow, and she had sense of the land's end. Suddenly she could not wait but hurried on alone across the shifting stones and began to climb the steep slope.

“Are you part goat?” Charles called after her. She laughed, and scrambled upward. When she reached the top, she felt as if she had attained the peak of the world. The ground fell away; the rocks that were a volcanic black jumble in one place and shelves white as marble in another went down into the sea and seemed to emerge again as long ledges, over which the swells broke. She heard the small cracking sound as a sea urchin hit the rocks and the gull that had dropped it came down with a great fanning of his wings.

But beyond the broken shore and the leisurely pattern of the surf, past the barriers of the ledges, was the sea itself—not the twenty miles or so that lay between here and the mainland, but the thousands that reached beyond the tower of Matinicus Rock to Europe. The wind of distance blew against her.

Charles didn't come. She looked back and saw him sitting on the bleached timbers down in the cove, smoking. She wandered around for a little while. She found the fine white skeleton of a sea urchin gleaming in the short coarse grass, and wrapped it in her handkerchief and put it in her pocket. The sun was dipping toward the sea and her shadow was long behind her. The energy generated in her by the meeting with the Mark Bennetts had taken her a great distance today, and. she had worked off most of her sense of frustration.

She went down into the cove again. “Do you know a short cut home?” she asked him.

He gave her a sideways look under his lashes. “Now you've seen what's at Sou'west Point, is it worth it?”

“You're a cynic, Charles.”

“Oh, I know it's something to see.” He got up, stretching. “I used to come down here in all weathers when my father kept sheep on here. Tell you when it's real handsome. Dawn on a winter morning when you're trying to get you a sea bird. One of those calm pretty mornings when the land's all black but the east turns the color of a ripe peach.” He spun his cigarette at the water. “Come on, there's an old cow path through the woods.”

He went up from the shore by an easier way, toward the long dark crest of forest, and she followed him, bemused by the number of facets he had shown in an afternoon. A little more than a week ago she had seen him a simple creature, vividly handsome as a young horse, all gloss and fire and pure animal instinct. Now he was something more.

She considered the other Bennetts. Mark was older, more heavily set in his ways. But Charles and his uncle Steve had the same quality of ease about them. That is, Charles had it at intervals; with his uncle it was probably more lasting. He seemed a tranquil personality; there was no tension in even his most preoccupied gestures.

In the woods the warm red-brown light under the trees was flecked and striped with dusty gold.

“Nice thing about these woods,” Charles remarked across the silence, “you don't have to think you'll meet a bear or a moose. There's not even a squirrel.”

“But they feel haunted,” said Philippa. “Hear my hushed tones? I don't dare speak up for fear of scaring someone—or something.” She laughed.